Interplay seems to be bringing back Black Isle studios. You can see the evidence on its homepage.

Now, before you get excited, let's have a little refresher course:

Interplay doesn't consist of the same people as it did back when Black Isle still existed.

Brian Fargo, the original founder of Interplay (who hasn't worked there for years and years), had this to say on Twitter about the news: "A game division is obviously only as good as the talent it employs."

If Interplay employs any talent, I haven't heard about it.

Interplay famously fired almost all its employees years ago and has been running with a skeleton crew ever since. They sold off the Fallout property but tried to weasel themselves into still making a Fallout MMO (and trying to sell Fallout 1, 2 and Tactics as "The Fallout Trilogy" in a sleazy move that pissed off Bethesda. They were unable to fulfill their part of the MMO deal and lost the property completely.

Black Isle as we knew it is more or less the same company as Obsidian these days. Those people still work there. They do not work at Black Isle.

Interplay is desperate to earn any kind of money.

Today's Interplay is run by businessmen, not gamers.

With all of that in mind, I predict this new Black Isle will crash and burn before they can even release a product. I predict a huge amount of ecstatic posts all over the internet when the news break for real, followed by a cold shower by anyone who is actually familiar with this company.

Sounds like what happened to the Atari name back a few years. Trying to cash in on an established memory. Look how well that has done...

Well, that was sort of different. Infogrames had a crappy company name and decided to change it into Atari because of recognition, and probably because everyone called them either "infogames" or "infrogames". They didn't pretend to be revitalizing the Atari brand beyond that. With the info we've currently got about the new Black Isle, it looks like Interplay wants people to believe this is the same exact company returning, which is obviously not even remotely true.